Undergraduate Thesis

An ongoing study.

Proposal:

Three questions will be addressed: 1) at what level of visual complexity is perception modulated by experience? 2) do artists and/or art historians exhibit superior perceptual abilities compared to Western controls? 3) does experience with abstract art enhance perceptual reorganization? A two-part study seeks to address these questions. In the first part of the study, artistic, art historical, and control subjects will engage in a series of perceptual tasks ranging from the recognition of line drawings to the control of bistable percepts. In the second part of the study, non-artistic control subjects will perform perceptual reorganization tasks before and after engaging with abstract artworks. The results of these studies shall compare perceptual abilities on tasks of varying complexity across subjects of varying levels of expertise.